Family life

Snapshot … George Harding, senior, in 1948, sitting on the bike he designed, built and sold to an American enthusiast to use on China's postwar roads.

Snapshot: My dad, the bicycle pioneer

This photograph from the Irish Press shows my father, GF Harding, sitting on a bicycle underneath a Constellation aeroplane flanked by the TWA pilot and an airline official. It is dated 1948 and the following report from the press cutting outlines the story:

The first stage in an unusual link between Cork City and Peiping, the ancient capital of China, was made on Thursday evening when a young Corkman completed the 80-mile journey to Shannon on a bicycle. He was Mr George F Harding of South Terrace, Cork, and the bicycle was a special one, which he built himself, and put on board a TWA cargo plane for New York. From there it will be shipped to Peiping.

The story began last summer, when a young native of Boston, Mass, Mr Joe Nerbonne, visited Schull in County Cork, the home of his mother's people. He was on his way back to the US from Europe with an urgent personal requirement, unsatisfied. An employee of the US Consulate in Peiping, he urgently required a bicycle that was not too heavy, not too light, yet able to stand up to Chinese wartime roads.

He could not buy one in the US and when he visited the recent cycle show in London, of the many thousands of machines exhibited, there was not one suitable and no British firm could manufacture and deliver him a special model sooner than four months. But at Schull, his wants were unexpectedly satisfied.

He met an enterprising young Corkman who agreed to make a bicycle exactly according to Mr Nerbonne's specifications. "Previous to this," said Mr Harding, I supplied eight machines to special orders to American youth hostellers as I am interested in this movement."

Mr Harding added, "I am just hoping myself some day, to make enough money to do a cycle tour of the US and that is going to be a lot of cycling."

My father's cycle tour was not to be, because he always appeared to be too busy, and he died in 1988 without fulfilling his ambition. Cycling and the cycle business was his life, and he was a founding member of An Óige the Irish Youth Hostelling Association in 1939.

He had been working in the Norman Cycles factory, in Kent, during the second world war, when he lived in Ashford. He returned to Cork and opened his shop there 16 July 1945. He was assistant manager in the first Tour of Britain cycle race in 1951 won by Ian Steel. One of the Irish team, Karl McCarthy, finished ninth.

My father eventually retired from the business in the early 1980s and I took it over. One day, in 1998, I overheard a man with an American accent talking to one of my employees. He said: "I bought a bicycle from George Harding here in 1948."

I interrupted the conversation, and on a wild hunch, said: "Would you ever be Joe Nerbonne?" And he was.

So I took him upstairs to the office to show him the photograph, and the letters he had written in the late 1940s and early 50s to my father, including one on Associated Press-headed paper from Saigon, in 1956. Joe told me he was in Cork with his son, to do the same thing that brought him to Cork in 1948 – cycle to Schull and check up on his ancestral family. On a different bicycle, of course. The bike in the photo was built with 26x1¾ wheels complete with cantilever brakes, which made it a forerunner of the modern mountain bike. George Harding

Playlist: Music, love and promises in the attic

"And the songbirds are singing like they know the score / And I love you ..."

When I was 17, a friend and his sister had three rooms that constituted the top of their parents' large Victorian house – and where their parents never ventured. A group of us, girls and boys, spent a lot of time hanging out there that summer, untroubled by adult intervention or advice.

Between the smoking, chatting and listening to records, love was avowed and promises made, trust given and betrayals perpetrated, tears shed and doors slammed. Looking back, it seems like a role-play activity in preparation for our impending adulthood. Prominent in the soundtrack to our summer was Fleetwood Mac's album Rumours.

It's hard to imagine the designers of today's relationships education syllabus recommending shutting a bunch of adolescents in an attic with a copy of Rumours and telling them to work it out, but that's how we did it, and we had fun along the way.

When I listen to the album today, more than 30 years on, I remember those raw, youthful passions. My favourite track is Songbird, an oasis of calm among the other songs that throb with bitter energy. When it came on, we'd go quiet and listen. Bickering is an exhausting business, and Songbird gave us a rest and time to ponder that none of it really mattered that much, before turning the record over and getting back into the fray. Morgan King

One teenage summer, my sister Ruth and I were staying with our cousins, the Wains. At our first lunchtime, Carl told us to pile everything we could find in the fridge and pantry on the table. "I'm going to have cheese and ham and ketchup," I said. "I had it once in a Little Chef and it's ace."

"Well, you can have a sandwich if you want," he said, "but I'm having a Wainy Wonder." He grabbed a piece of bread and the butter. Then cut a slice of cheese. A lettuce leaf went on. So far, so sandwich. Then some mustard. A slice of tinned corned beef. He looked round the table and spotted pickled gherkins. A cucumber. On a second piece of bread, he spread peanut butter, then turned it over and plonked it on top of the teetering tower. Ruth and I looked at each other and grinned. Then we grabbed the bread and began rootling through the packets, jars and tins on the table to begin our own constructions.

If you've done it right, a Wainy Wonder will be difficult to eat: either because it is too thick, or because the filling is spilling. There are only two rules: it must have at least four ingredients (not counting butter) and, since you've made it yourself, you have to eat it all.

Ruth and I were astonished to learn recently that both Carl and Richard had forgotten all about their legendary creation. She and I – and now my own kids – still gorge ourselves on Wainy Wonders, while my cousins' offspring are stuck in the Late Sandwich Age.

So, what's my favourite Wainy Wonder? If you're asking, you're missing the point: the aficionado approaches the construction of the next Wainy Wonder with no preconceived ideas. If you're thinking "Marmite, ham, cheese, pineapple ring and some crisps on top" then you're not inventing a glorious Wainy Wonder, you're just making a sandwich – and where's the fun in that? Paul Johnson

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We will pay £25 for every Snapshot, Playlist, We love to eat or Letter to we publish. Email family@theguardian.com or write to Family Life, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please don't send original photographs but do include your address and phone number